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Subject: 
Re: Gear spacings.
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Wed, 8 Nov 2000 01:53:48 GMT
Original-From: 
Steve Baker <SJBAKER1@AIRMAIL.NETsaynotospam>
Reply-To: 
sjbaker1@airmail.net&spamcake&
Viewed: 
763 times
  
Jennifer Clark wrote:

J G Gregory wrote:

So who is going to publish the super handbook on all these?  We really need
a "Technic Techniques" companion to the Mindstorms books.  Although things
like this are fairly trivial to compute, having a handy reference would be
nice.

Something else I've thought would be handy would be a program which would take
as inputs the desired positions of the input and output axles in a gear train
and the desired gear ratio. Space constraints in the form of "bricks" blocking
off certain volumes of space would also be input. The program would then go off
and compute all possible gear trains (if any) that fit the parameters. A degree
of "fuzziness" could be built in that would allow, for example, variations of
the desired gear ratio, and perhaps a factor could be specified stating the
desired "perfectness" of the gear geometry.

Well, I think this is something you could divide into two parts:

  STEP 1:  Find all combination of gears that'll produce a gear ratio
           within some user-specified range using less than some specified
           number of gear wheels.

That's a simple problem to program - and it shouldn't produce *VAST* lists
of possible solutions so long as you don't let it use more than some reasonable
number of gears...there just aren't all that many combinations.

  STEP 2:  Find all possible ways of getting a particular set of gears to connect
           and axle at point A to another axle at point B.  This is also a simple
           problem since there are rarely more than a couple of choices for ways
           to connect one gear to it's neighbour...hence it shouldn't be hard to
           simply list all possible geometries for a particular gear train - and
           then reject all those that don't come close to connecting point A to
           point B.

Feeding the output of STEP 1 into STEP 2 should result in a program that would
run to completion in a reasonable amount of time.

Since the number of ways to connect A to B with a gear ratio within some specified
range will typically be quite small - I think it's up to the human brain to reject
those that don't fit around the obstacles.

Since STEP 1 and STEP 2 are both useful programs in their own rights, they should
probably be left as two separate programs.

The problem is obviously of exponential complexity, but for small numbers of
gears is no doubt managable without resorting to complex AI or constraint
satisfaction techniques.

I don't think you need much more than brute force techniques.

Of course, if it could also work out the necessary bracing to hold it all
together, it would be even better :-)

Now *that* is hard!

--
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
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                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Gear spacings.
 
(...) Something else I've thought would be handy would be a program which would take as inputs the desired positions of the input and output axles in a gear train and the desired gear ratio. Space constraints in the form of "bricks" blocking off (...) (24 years ago, 7-Nov-00, to lugnet.robotics)

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